jQuery Foundation Adopts Mousewheel Plugin

The jQuery Foundation is pleased to announce that Brandon Aaron has donated his jquery-mousewheel plugin to the jQuery Foundation. Brandon is a jQuery team alumnus and he leaves the plugin in great shape with very few open issues. It’s a very popular plugin, one that’s often used along with jQuery UI and other widgets.

Adopting the mousewheel plugin is part of the jQuery Foundation’s mission to make a web developer’s work easier. We want to ensure that web developers can use this plugin and be confident it will be supported into the future. We can’t do this alone, of course, and encourage the community to pitch in with pull requests and by providing support to the jQuery Foundation. You can find it at https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mousewheel/.

Abandoned or neglected open source projects can be a thorn in the side of web developers. When a developer’s personal project becomes wildly popular, it often exceeds that person’s ability to maintain and support it. More developers should take the step that Brandon did, seeking out someone who can take over the reins when they no longer have the time. As Eric Raymond says in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, “When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.”